Denis’ Blog

Using open source as a distribution model is a very efficient strategy when well executed. Alfresco in the DMS/ECM world has been taking incredible market shares in just 2 years, as MySQL did in the RDBMs world. Many domains have now their open source challenger: Montavista in the embedded World, Digium with Asterisk in VOIP/e-pbx, Hyperic and GroundWork in the Monitoring, Funambol in the mobile/telco industry, Pentaho in BI or OpenBravo in ERP.

In the Enterprise search space, two companies have demonstrated a clear strategy leveraging an open source model:

• IBM, with Omnifind! Yahoo Edition are also leveraging open source with an entry-level solution. But like IBM is doing with Websphere Express (Geronimo based) and Websphere, that is not a real offer? That’s a teaser to have a foot in the door and to push Omnifind.
• More interesting, SearchBlox is proposing a great value proposal around Lucene and the Carrot Clustered Search Engine. But Lucene lakes enterprise grade features like mapped security and a whole bunch of connectors.

And that’s where come Dieselpoint. Dieselpoint has announced today the launch of OpenPipelines . The future will tell if they are serious in their execution. They know well the enterprise search market and will propose a nice mix of features. But this move from Dieselpoint seems to be a defensive one. In a challenged market (Google Mindshare, FAST/Microsoft/Search 2008, Autonomy leadership, dozens of serious competitors), and given that Dieselpoint has already a technology, this move is not a full open source strategy like Alfresco’s one. It is maybe more a move like the one of CA opensourcing Ingres: I am challenged, I am loosing market share, let’s rejuvenate the beast with an open source sticker :-). I am probably too sarcastic. Intalio in the BPM world has demonstrated that you can leverage open source to go from a 100% proprietary strategy to a “blended” one like our friends of BEA used to say. Wait & See.

So we stay with an open question: who will propose an enterprise grade solution with a full open source distribution model. Enterprise Search is very similar to RDBMs:

• the dual-licencing strategy works, with the right licencing an enterprise search open source company can boost OEM.
• it is a product thousands of consultants and integrators are looking for every day for they application and projects. The bottom-up, low cost sales strategy well described be Matt from Alfresco will perfectly work.
• Established leaders (Autonomy, Google) will be more than challenged with the move

The thing is that in Enterprise Search, unlike DMS or RDBMs, there is key Intellectual Property in the motor. Algorithms are key in the value proposal. At least for now. So moving to open source can be touchy. But given the market trend to commoditization and the strong position of IS leaders (IBM, Microsoft and Oracle), I am convinced that we will see in the next 12 months some pretty aggressive move in enterprise search space towards open source distribution model.

Now the question is. Who will do it? Coveo? Exalead? Intellisearch? Sinequa? Vivisimo?

Take your bet.

It’s done. Microsoft today announced that they bid on Fast Search & Transfer. FAST is public and Microsoft has still almost 60% to acquire on the market, but I am confident they will.

This is great news:

1. Now the position of Microsoft in the Gartner Magic Quadrant will be justified . No seriously the enter of MS at this position in 2006 was..well..very optimistic. Call that anticipation…. Whatever the problems of FAST have been, this is a good technology, a technology that delivers. With the raising success of MOSS 2007, Microsoft will now be able to find needles in haystacks
2. They offer a 43% premium. I hope you read my previous post on the subject .
3. Autonomy stock price soared of 10%, and this is not over. I really hope you read that post. :-). More than that, this news is a very good news for Autonomy. It confirmed it is a very potential targets AND it will help Autonomy to consolidate on the short term its position on the high end market.
4. This will accelerate the idea that Enterprise Search is now an important topic. Say bye bye the Search Engine OEM in portals, bye bye to poor search abilities in ECM. Microsoft will push hard and will now attack Filenet and Documentum in the middle-end ECM market, Google in the Enterprise Search space.

Now let’s analyze what could happen:

• Google will have to accelerate. The Google GSA still lakes key Enterprise grade features like mapped security, usable clustering and business vocabularies management features. It is time to deliver for Google if they want to win more that Mini and GSA to index a few To of HTML
• Small players will have to react: Coveo or Sinequa were betting a lot on the MOSS 2007 integration. Well, I guess they will have now more difficult relationships with MS :-).
• “Visionaries” players like Exalead, Vivisimo or Endeca have a good opportunity to position themselves as the last independent players. It will be tough since on the low end Google is there, and on the high end Autonomy and FAST are confirmed as established leaders.
• IBM will strengthen its offer. I do not see another acquisition for them in that field. They are late, but their recent involvement in the UIMA open project tends to demonstrate that they will adopt the same strategy as the one they executed with Eclipse/Websphere Application Designer
• Oracle and SAP will have to move. Autonomy? Endeca?

I would bet Endeca acquired by Oracle and Autonomy by SAP. Only one beer on it. What do you think?